An astonishing security lapse allegedly allowed an American soldier to pass
hundreds of thousands of secret documents to the Wikileaks website, a new
book will reveal.

The army private who is accused of downloading the material in Iraq had “unrestricted access” to millions of classified documents “with virtually no supervision or safeguards”, according to a publication obtained by The Daily Telegraph.

The authors, David Leigh and Luke Harding, of The Guardian, name Specialist Bradley Manning, the soldier being held in a US military jail, as the alleged source of the information which was passed on to The Guardian by WikiLeaks.

Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, has repeatedly refused to confirm that Mr Manning was the source of the information.

Last night Alan Rusbridger, the editor of the Guardian, defended the decision to name Mr Manning as the source of the material, saying it was a matter of record that the soldier had openly admitted to being the source of the data.

Mr Manning, 23, was charged last year with the unauthorised disclosure of classified material and faces a jail term of several decades if he is tried and convicted.

The book also discloses that Mr Assange wore a wig and dressed as a woman as he tried to evade the media after the release of the US embassy cables last November.

The Guardian and WikiLeaks previously worked closely together to release the sensitive American documents but the website is now accusing the newspaper of betrayal over its decision to go public with information about their relationship.

The website and the Guardian stopped co-operating following a disagreement over the handling of the story.

WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy, which is published this week, devotes two chapters to the means by which Mr Manning leaked hundreds of thousands of documents to WikiLeaks, including US diplomatic cables and military logs relating to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

At Camp Hammer, 40 miles east of Baghdad, the army intelligence worker was issued with two US laptops, one connected to the US State Department and Department of Defense, the other connected to the Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System, through which secret communications were sent.

“From his first day at Hammer, he was puzzled by the lax security,” the authors write. “The door was bolted with a five-digit cipher lock, but all you had to do was knock on the door and you’d be let in.” The soldier is said to have downloaded hundreds of thousands of documents on to computer CDs labelled “Lady Gaga”.

He is alleged to have turned to WikiLeaks because he had been impressed by its release of 500,000 pager messages intercepted on the day of the September 11 attacks on New York in 2001, which “made him feel comfortable that he, too, could come forward to WikiLeaks without fear of being identified”.